Hospital rights in NY to be gained through law, not marriage
Members of AtMP’s email list may have noticed that we’re paying a lot of attention to hospital rights (a catch-all term for people’s ability to visit and make medical decisions for each other in emergency situations). As a native New Yorker myself, I was shocked to discover that New Yorkers have fewer medical decision-making rights than most other Americans.
Advocates of marriage equality talk about health care decision making as if it depends on the right to marry. For example, a leading NY marriage equality web page says “We are routinely denied access to such fundamental protections as medical decision-making authority.” The linkage of medical decision making to marriage is misleading. Married New Yorkers do not have the right to make medical decisions for their spouses in the absence of written directives, except in ‘do not resuscitate’ situations. Neither parents, siblings nor close friends have this right – it does not exist in NY State.
(Of course, all competent NY adults do have the right to designate health care proxies and to choose whether to have extraordinary resuscitation using state-approved documentation. Unfortunately, few New Yorkers do the paperwork. And, unmarried New Yorkers have great protections for hospital visitation.)
A proposal called the Family Health Care Decisions Act would fix this situation. I’ll present AtMP’s recommendations for making it even stronger when I visit lawmakers in Albany next Tuesday.
If you live in NY, please urge your state senators to co-sponsor the act.
